1999 - 2000 Broadcast Season
Broadcast Program Transcripts
Episode #1528
May 5, 2000

Holloway: If you your child or someone you know is in the market for college level education, North Carolina's public universities are an affordable choice and the UNC system's school leaders want to make sure that they offer a competitive choice. How will they remain competitive if they don't get the funding they need to build better facilities? This is one of the critical issues facing our state and believe it or not, your voice can make a difference. Find out how it can next on Black Issues Forum. Stay tuned.

Voiceover: This program is made possible in part by contributions from UNC-TV viewers like you.

[THEME MUSIC]

Holloway: Good evening and thank you for joining us for another edition of Black Issues Forum. I'm your host Jay Holloway and tonight we round out our series on public education funding with two Triangle institutions. First I would like to welcome Dr. Maryanne Fox, Chancellor of North Carolina State University. Thank you Dr. Fox for joining us. Also, Dr. Eugene Eaves, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs in North Carolina Central University. Thank you both for joining us and wrapping up this series of your other peer institutions as we talk about this very important need.

Fox: Thank you for having us here.

Holloway: Thank you for being with us. There are many needs. There are the obvious capital needs of all the facilities that we've been hearing about. There's the need for increased, possibly increased tuition, the need for faculty's salaries-when I say increased tuition it's actually financial aid for the students. But the capital needs are probably the most pressing issues and both of your institutions were visited back in the spring by the legislative committee and had a chance to see what we're talking about. Chancellor Fox, how bad is this need at your institution, NC State?

Fox: Well, Jay, we have two major needs. One is dealing with enrollment management, making sure there are enough facilities for all the students who can benefit from an education that focuses on science, engineering and technology, particularly at an institution that's focused on research. We also have condition and quality needs and the really very important question of providing laboratory experiences for those who are going to move into the private sector after graduation and be the leaders in understanding science. We can't do state of the art science with laboratories that haven't been renovated for 30 years. So both capacity and renovation leave us far behind our competitors.

Holloway: Dr. Eaves, we've heard that same thing consistently across the board at other campuses, is it the same at Central?

Eaves: It is not unlike the situation at North Carolina State. Our facilities are old. In addition to that, we've grown in terms of the number of students we have and the number of faculty we have doing the teaching. The fact is, if we cite science, let's take biology in particular, when we built the facility we had ten teachers and we built ten laboratories. We now have 24 teachers and ten laboratories. We probably had about 2,000 students, we have nearly 6,000 now. So over time, we've used them, we were happy to have had them, they are no longer adequate.

Holloway: Let me ask you both, how did these legislators receive their visit, their tours at their institutions? What did they walk away with?

Fox: The legislators, of course, had been told by our external consultants that we had serious problems with conditions, with maintenance and repairs, and with capacity, but being able to see it first hand I think really opened a lot of eyes. They recognized that this is not an optional expense. We're not able to retain the best quality of faculty which will make this system competitive with other states unless we have the space that allow our research-intensive faculty to do their work. It's even more important in many ways than faculty salaries. Faculty can tolerate sometimes making a few fewer dollars if they have the capacity and the wherewithal to do their work, but they won't tolerate not having enough space and not being able to do what they want to. It's part of the reason that they chose an academic career, to be able to work with students actively and to participate in discover and in laboratory effects.

Holloway: Chancellor Fox, quite often when people think about the funding needs, NC State and UNC Chapel Hill are the two largest public higher education institutions and receive a large share of the funding, but help our audience to understand why and I'd like you to address this Eva Klein peer ranking classification.

Fox: Well, we have a large budget of course because we're the largest institution in the system. We have 28,000 students at NC State and the largest fraction of African-American students of the historically non-Black institutions. We want to serve them as well as we possibly can and two years ago the legislature commissioned an independent consultant who would look at both the quality and the space needs at each one of the campuses. Eva Klein went through the campuses in great detail, spent a long time on each one of the campuses trying to determine exactly how the space available met the mission and the enrollment pressure that each one of the campuses was experiencing. That's how the number arose by adding together the individual needs for renovation and repair, for buildings, for example at NC State's campus, two-thirds of which haven't been renovated and are over 30 years old.

Holloway: So you are in the classification of comprehensive.

Fox: We're a research I institution and what that means is that we compete with the most highly ranked institutions all over the country, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Georgia Tech, with Cal Tech, with Michigan State, Texas A&M. We compete with Duke for retaining faculty in our local environment. It's because of the need for the ability to work in the scholarly areas at the very highest levels that we need a package that includes salary and space that allow us to attract and to keep the best faculty.

Holloway: Dr. Eaves, on the other hand, where does Central fall out from the Eva Klein study in classification?

Eaves: Not too differently.

Holloway: But it's not funded at the same level?

Eaves: No it is not. We're a comprehensive university II without engineering, I think was the terminology that was used. That was for the purpose of setting salaries. We did point out as well that if an engineering school was a professional school, then we too, as odd it may sound, also have a professional school. So they did try to make some adjustments there, but Eva Klein did for us what she did for all of the other schools in the system. She did a complete assessment. She disagreed with our numbers in terms of projected enrollments. We projected 10,000 undergraduates and 3,000 graduate and professional students by the year 2007. I think she cut us back to about 9 or 10,000 altogether and on the basis of her assessment she made the judgement that we would probably not need additional facilities, which is a point that we disagree with, I would have to say totally disagree with. we don't have facilities that work for example. If you talk about, for example, the teaching of chemistry, if I could just say that, the fume hoods in our building don't work. Now, you can't teach chemistry if the fume hoods don't work. There is a gas leak somewhere. They have shut off the gas to the building, so heat-conducted experiments are being done with hotplates. How does that set in the industrial or the commercial sector? So some of our needs are perhaps more aggravated than have been illustrated in the Eva Klein study. I think, however, that the need for the science complex that we have been asking for, because there is increasing demand that on our campus from our young people and from our faculty and from the constituencies that we serve, for a greater improvement, if you will, in the area of science and technology. You do know that we recently opened, I think, last fall, the Biomedical Biotechnology Research Institute. One of the things that we noticed is, as Chancellor Fox has said here, when people come into a facility of that kind, the frequently come baring gifts but they come asking to be fairly compensated. At an institution like ours, for example, that's a task that's not too easily undertaken, but we're doing well and we're attracting research scholars now. We believe that that's important particularly for our area. She saw other things that she thought that we might be able to correct and I suspect if the renovations of some of these older facilities, very few of which are less than 30 years old, that's just a problem that needs to be addressed in addition to being too small for what we are today, they are also inadequate.

Holloway: We're talking about funding our public higher education, institutions of higher education in the UNC system, 16 campuses. Two of them are here in the Triangle area, we're talking with NC State and NC Central University this evening. Let me say also for our viewers that may have missed it, that we are running a series documentary called "A Building Crisis". If our viewers have missed that it has already run and will run certainly this weekend as well. While we talking about this issue, let me ask you-Eva Klein also did another study and we alluded to this earlier when we talk about historical neglect, we didn't say this word but you all have alluded that that's how we got to this point where we are now. Let's talk about that and why it's such an important reason right now that the public understand that you're really in a crisis and it is based on historical neglect.

Fox: The neglect has been an underinvestment in renovation and repair and as a result the things that are difficult to see when visitors come to campus have accumulated. The airflow through the hoods, as you were discussing; the ventilation; the sidewalks and the street repairs; because the campus is not going to collapse because of them, they are deferred. Eventually, as more and more students want the kind of education, particularly at the advanced undergraduate level, at the graduate level, in our most research-intensive programs the masters and Ph.D. programs, increasingly these become very serious problems and because there is such a backlog, it's almost impossible for us to correct that backlog if we don't have additional capacity. We're already at a stage where we're getting very, very selective in admissions. We had this year, for example, almost 13,000 applications for only 3,500 seats and to the extent that that happens the high school GPA has moved up and up. We're at a stage where at NC State to be admitted the average student have about a 4.0 from high school, that is all A's in high school. We of course have some around that average who have weaker records than that, especially if they have leadership potential and have interacted strongly with the community. We welcome them, but it's been increasingly difficult to manage enrollment and at the same time assemble the funds necessary to do the renovation and repair. It's true not only at State it's also true at Chapel Hill, it's true at many of the historically Black colleges and of course at the other institutions in our system.

Holloway: Dr. Eaves, let's ask you, how is this building crisis affecting the student standards in admissions at Central?

Eaves: I don't think that you recruit good students if you don't offer them good facilities as well as good instruction, obviously. Sometimes you have to offer them scholarships, but when you bring a top flight student to campus-and let's say you're recruiting if you will, an ace out there. He's probably got the 4.0 and 1,250-1,300 on the SAT and you're saying, "You've got a full ride here." Then you show him where he's going to live and he has to think about it. I don't know that in other instances on other campuses that he would think so hard or so long. But at North Carolina Central I think our situation has become so aggravated or exaggerated if you will, or exacerbated, I don't know which is the appropriate term; the point is is that with few exceptions, our residential facilities leave much to be desired. You talked about the effect on recruitment and enrollment. We've tried to respond to the demands of modernization for example by putting in the fiber optic infrastructure for technology to give them access to the internet. Everywhere you look you've got these little boxes on the wall.

Holloway: In the old buildings.

Eaves: In the old buildings. So it's an interesting juxtaposition of images here. You've still got a barracks style dormitory. Then you have to go in and make these adjustments if they're going to have their computers in there. At some point in time, I'm sure that we will be demanding, as most of the institutions will, that our students arrive with computer in hand or we will just build it into the tuition and make sure that they're able to do that. Now we're doing some things that we believe have appeal to our students. We give them Cablevision for example. We hope they are looking at A&E and CNN and .

Holloway: UNC-TV.

Eaves: And UNC-TV, you're right. We find that that is one of the attractive features, but the fact of the matter is to give them free Cablevision and not give them the direct access to information technology that they require, seems to me to fall short and I think that we have to do something about that.

Holloway: Chancellor Fox, can you address the fact, distance learning is a topic that people are beginning hear about, but information technology on campus you would say has to be in place before you can even address that?

Fox: Well, we're very proud that our residence halls have all been completely wired. We do charge our students for access to Cablevision and we do have revenue streams that allow us to amortize the cost of our residence halls. We've done that aggressively, which means that our students have a higher bill. It means that our financial aid needs are that much higher to help out those who really need that extra boost over their family income to allow that to happen, but we've made that investment because we believe that information technology is absolutely necessary for the quality of education. Quite apart from delivering at a distance which will require many of the same investments, we think that classroom instruction, the ability to communicate electronically outside of the classroom with one's professors and one's peers is really going to be a vital part of the education. But can you substitute a laboratory for a fiber optic thought experiment? I think not yet.

Eaves: And you make a good point. I tell you, our young people want and I think deserve many of the things they ask for.

Holloway: Without leaving the state.

Eaves: Without leaving the state, you're right, and they ought to be able to get it at the institution of their choice. We struggle with things like broken steam pipes. Repair it in one place and it's new, it's stronger, puts additional pressure on something that might be 75 years old and it will break. But the point being made is that the students do see that and your students go home and they say, "Well, it's not quite so pretty as it ought to be." Or, "It's not quite so beautiful as Mom said the campus was when she was there." I don't think they're as patient as we were, years ago, and they compare notes from campus to campus.

Holloway: Let me ask you about that in terms of a historical neglect when the moms were there and the people were there years ago. The state did not support the HBCUs, historically Black colleges, as it did the others. That's another form of historical neglect and I think Chancellor Chambers has stated that in public forums. Is that still an issue for your institution?

Eaves: I don't want to say that it is still an issue, but I do think that historical neglect is a very real topic. It would seem to me for example to say that we funding you adequately today without given any consideration to what you failed to do 20 years ago and if we were forced to engage in deferred maintenance if the campus was not going to fall down, and now the funding comes and it comes in the wake of facilities that are either not completed, for example, our gymnasium is about half the size it was intended to be. B.N. Duke Auditorium only seats 900 people. We don't have a facility in all of Durham that could house our commencement. So you add that up and you start to talk about attracting students and making sure that they have access to an education that is comfortable assuming for example that you're giving them comparable instruction. I think our library needs to be updated. It is not state of the art now. There are just so many other areas that I could point to but I'm saying that to you to say that we are part of, if I could use a library for example, the Triangle Research Libraries Network, which is made up of Duke, State, Carolina and North Carolina Central. We would like to see ourselves as a junior partner in that because we think our students are just as hungry for knowledge as the other are.

Holloway: And the student's research has shown that they really value that.

Eaves: And they do value that.

Fox: Absolutely.

Eaves: The point is, though, that we need to do something to give greater access from the inside of that building to all those vast resources and we aren't able to do it because we don't have the funding.

Fox: Not only do the students value it but the accreditation agencies value it very highly and for our programmatic improvements and for a reputation to be build for all of our institutions together we really need a major investment in library space.

Holloway: Let's talk about that. We have just less than five minutes here now. Let's talk about how this funding or building crisis or even the funding crisis, I guess as it really is, affects our students and your faculty. Because someone is going to have to pay for this, we don't know how the legislature is going to resolve it, but how is this thing going to be resolved? I know you can't wave a magic wand, but what does the public need to know about this?

Fox: Well the general administration has a very workable plan.

Eaves: The University System's general administration.

Fox: Which takes into consideration the needs of each one of the campuses. It provides a sequence of buildings. It allows us to address capacity and then to retrofit and reconvert buildings that are not in pristine condition, ones in which there is a health hazard, able to convert them to modern science. It will make all the difference in terms of the quality of the programs and our ability to give students the options that they want to pursue.

Holloway: In terms of financial aid as well as faculty salaries and the whole picture?

Fox: All of that will come in together but unless we have the facilities we will not be able to attract the faculty from whom we can even address in terms of faculty salaries, nor will we attract the students for whom financial aid will be necessary.

Eaves: Perhaps the best example I can think of is how we were able to superstars when we say that we have a spot available here at the Biotech Research Institute, bring your grant down here; and the responses have been great. On the other hand, when you're trying to recruit top flight faculty to work in a building where the still is broken, where the fume hoods don't work, and where you're conducting heated experiments with hotplates, you're hard pressed to make that argument. I think like Chancellor Fox here, there's a lot that we have to do and I think that the general administration has in fact developed a plan to help us address it. I do know that high on Chancellor Chamber's agenda and one which I endorse 100% is that we need a new science complex. We have increasing numbers of students who want it, we have faculty who deserve it, and the other thing that he wants is to get rid of something that will not be as accommodating to tomorrow's student. We envision that they will be older, many of them will be married, probably have children. This means we're going to have to have daycare. We will have to have something other than the old barrack style. We're going to need dormitories or residences if you will that are built in suites that would give a degree of privacy and independence. We have another problem too, at least at North Carolina Central, I don't know that it is true.you seem to have a lot of space out there at Centennial Campus, but we are landlocked. I think the last thing that this chancellor or this administration would want to do is to start engaging in imminent domain imposition. It doesn't make for good relations in the community in which you're located and so we have no more space and we can't go higher up.

Holloway: Chancellor Fox, we've got about a minute left. You've got the last word here.

Fox: We need a major investment in our undergraduate research labs because they are a gate. They stop students from going forward into so many different disciplines. We need to have the support that will allow our students to succeed in higher education because we need them in North Carolina for leadership in the areas that undergird most of our economic development. If this goes to a bond issue at some point in the future, we ask that we get the enthusiastic support of the community who realizes how important higher education is.

Holloway: I want to thank you all so much for coming and appearing on Black Issues Forum. It has really been hopefully enlightening and concludes our series with ten different UNC institutions and thank you all both for taking the time to join us.

Fox: Delighted to be with you, Jay.

Eaves: Yes, very good to be here.

Holloway: And thank you Dr. Eaves, as well. I'd like to thank once again, both Dr. Eaves and Chancellor Fox from both NC State and NCCU. I also want to remind you to check your local listing, coming up on this Sunday the program "A Building Crisis" is has already aired this month but it will air again this Sunday at 1:00, you don't want to miss it for information about this. Thank you once again for joining us tonight. If you'd like to know more about this topic, please visit our website or call us at the numbers on your screen. You can also obtain a transcript of today's program or any of the other previous programs. It's on our website as well. That website is www.unctv.org. Our Black Issues Forum telephone line you can call (919) 549-7167. We'd love to hear your comments or any questions you may have. Again, we want to thank you for watching and we'll talk with you again next Friday night at 11:00 right here on UNC-TV for more provocative discussions. I'm Jay Holloway for Black Issues Forum, you have a blessed evening and a good night.

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